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Friday, June 22, 2012

“It is the Myth that Gives Life”: C.S. Lewis and the True Myth

Note: This is the text from a presentation I made at the
Springville Library on June 21, 2012 as part of their "So You Want to
Read!" series. Obviously, I was asked to speak on C.S. Lewis.

Art by Liz Pulido for Zion Theatre Company.

Many people do not know that C.S. Lewis—the unapologetic Christian apologist, the author of spiritual classics such as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Till We Have Faces, and Mere Christianity
—was once an avowed atheist. It was during this early period of
skeptical secularism that he went through an intimate, beautiful, and
spiritual transformation that led him away from his secular atheism to
the road that made him become perhaps the most celebrated Christian
author and thinker of the 20th century. It was during this
period of change when C.S. Lewis—who preferred the enigmatic nick name
“Jack,” which I will often be calling him by, so don’t get
confused—took a night time walk in the woods with two of his friends:
J.R.R. Tolkien, future author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings;
as well as Hugo Dyson, a capable Shakespearean professor and scholar.
These three would later make up the core of what would become the
celebrated literary group The Inklings, but that illustrious group was
still a ways off. This night they were just friends engaged in a life
altering conversation that would assist Jack on the last leg of his
journey away from his secular past and into his spiritual future.

But
Jack wasn’t going down (or up) without a fight. Even though Jack had
recently had some powerful spiritual experiences that were leading him
back to a belief in God, yet he still resisted the “myth” aspect of
Christianity. “Christianity may have many things going for it,” he
argued to his friends, “Originality is not one of them.”

C.S.
Lewis… or, again, Jack as he preferred… saw Christianity as no different
to the other “dying god myths.” The Egyptian god Osiris, the Norse god
Balder, the Greek Titan Prometheus… they, too were stories of a god’s
death and resurrection, and Christianity was the Johnny come lately to
that kind of narrative. Jesus Christ was no different than these more
ancient, imaginary gods. That was Jack’s position at the time, one which
would change over the course of the evening’s walk in the woods,
feeling the nighttime breeze whisper to him another answer.

But
we’ll get back to that. Let’s cut to the future when Jack has not only
long converted to Christianity, but is known as one of its most ardent
defenders. Jack was once again engaged in a debate, this time taking the
side of faith while his friend “Corineus” claimed the banner of the
secularists. Corineus, not unlike the younger Jack who debated Tolkien
and Dyson, accused modern Christians of only holding onto the shell of
Christianity while slowly replacing its core doctrines with modern
thoughts, making it Christianity in name only. He said it was much like
the British monarchy was no monarchy at all, but rather a front for a
much more modern government that had little to do with its original
form. It was a myth that was only a front for inevitable modernism.

“Why
not cut the cord?” asked Corineus. “Everything would be much easier if
you would free your thought from this vestigial mythology” (God in The Dock, “Myth Became Fact,” p. 64).

There’s
that word again: Mythology. The context with which that word is often
used is not what I would necessarily call positive. Myths are parts of
antiquated sytems of belief which have, in one way or another, proven
untrue, right? Science has revealed that there is no Apollo in a flying
chariot dragging the sun across the sky. There is no hammer wielding god
named Thor creating thunder and lightning. There are no trickster gods
like Ananzi or Malibu, tripping up our lives and causing havoc. Myths
are nothing more than “lies breathed through silver,” as the young,
atheistic Lewis said. Or at least that’s what he thought then, and what
many modern skeptics think now. Myths may be fun to tell to children, or
to entertain oneself with a little bit of escapism. They may even on
one level be beautiful, a flight of fancy that has an aesthetic quality
that one can appreciate on the same level one can appreciate high art.
But that is as seriously as a person ought to take it. Myths are maps
and systems of lies and errors, nothing more. They are for the gullible
and the young, not for the seasoned mind of the intellectual or the
thinker. They are not on any level to be seen as real.

So
when people call Christianity a myth, there is a definite challenge
there. When Jack challenged Tolkien and Dyson, and in return when
Corineus challenged Jack, the accusation implied that Christians were
intellectual light weights, superstitious folk, or ignorant children.

And
yet. And yet, even in his atheistic days, C.S. Lewis was drawn to
mythology and storytelling. One of Jack’s oldest childhood friends was a
young man named Arthur Greeves. Although Arthur was a bit odd and a
kind of imaginary invalid, he and Jack had hit it off when they were
young because they both had a great love for obscure mythology,
especially of the Norse variety. They were drawn to the Valkyrie, and
Balder, and Thor, and Brunhilde… the cold, ancient beauty of those old
myths stirred things in their souls which weren’t always explainable.

And
they weren’t even just the classic myths that attracted Jack. He was
more than capable of making up his own worlds and realms and
mythologies. As a young boy, C.S. Lewis, or “Jacksie” as he re-named
himself to the world as a child, made up an ornate world called Boxen,
inhabited by talking animals. He and his brother Warnie would climb into
their family’s wardrobe and tell each these stories. Children climbing
into a wardrobe… sound familiar?

Let’s go there for a moment, that
magical world in a wardrobe. In Jack’s more mature creation, Narnia,
there is a tale that we call TheSilver Chair. In this
particular event of the history of that magical world, there were two
children named Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole who were sent by the great
Lion Aslan to find and rescue the lost Prince Rilian. The children’s
guide and fellow traveler in this quest was a Narnian Marshwiggle named
Puddleglum. Puddleglum, who had tall legs, thin, with reed-like hair,
webbed feet, and an almost amphibious-like nature, was what we may term a
pessimist. No matter what situation he and the children found
themselves in, he was certain to see it in its worst possible light,
although despite this cynicism, he was also perhaps the bravest and
kindest of the company.

Also, paradoxically, Puddleglum was what
we might call a creature of faith. When Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill
finally found the lost Prince, the Prince was underneath the earth, in a
cavernous terrain with no light or wind or true warmth. Here the Prince
was the prisoner of a Green dressed enchantress, and soon the
enchantress worked her magic upon the children and Puddleglum as well,
with her lulling magic, almost convincing them that there was no Narnia,
no sun, no light, no wind. Her kind of logic, touched with a sinister
kind of magic, was certainly bewitching, and certainly not unlike the
other challenges we have heard so far. Away from the sun, from the sky,
from trees, from grass, from Aslan himself, brought down into a
cavernous Underworld, all of those things had become only stories to
those who lived there. They were mythology.

Even under
the witch’s charms, though, Puddleglum makes an interesting, almost
paradoxical argument for the existence of the world he had come from:

“Suppose we have only
dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and
moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is
that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important
than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is
the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a
funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a
game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a
play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to
stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side, even if there isn’t any
Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if
there isn’t any Narnia” (The Silver Chair, Chapter 12).

Now
when I first read Puddleglum’s argument, I remember it struck me in two
ways. On one level, it was utter nonsense! Coming from the company’s
resident realist, it was an odd thing to say that Narnia was real
because it was more beautiful than the witch’s world. That’s not an
argument at all! Beauty has no correlation with reality! You don’t
believe something just because it’s beautiful, you believe something
because it is a fact… even when those facts are cold, hard and uncaring.

Yet,
simultaneously, something about Puddleglum’s argument struck to the
most intimate core of me. I didn’t even understand it entirely at first,
but there was an inner resonance, an ancient instinct awoken by
Puddleglum’s words. It didn’t seem to be mere emotion, or wish
fulfillment, or any other easy excuse like that. It was something
ancient and something real.

In a lot of places in C.S. Lewis’s
writing, you’ll find that he references this elusive thing he calls
“joy.” He talks about feeling it as a child, when his brother Warnie
brought him a tiny “garden in a biscuit tin.” This miniature piece of
Eden was in no real way a garden, it was just a child’s
imitation of one, but it created a sensation in Jack that would stick
with him for the rest of his life. It was “joy.”

In his earliest Christian work after his conversion The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S.
Lewis creates an allegory around his protagonist John, who goes through
a journey towards faith, not unlike Lewis’s own. In the book, this joy
and longing is referenced often, and there is even a scene that may
remind one of Jack’s childhood “garden in a biscuit tin.” In the book,
John has a scene experiencing Joy, which he also sometimes called
longing:

Then came the sound of a musical instrument,
from behind it seemed, very sweet and very short, as if it were one
plucking of a string or one note of a bell, and after it a full, clear
voice—and it sounded so high and strange that he thought it was very far
away, further than a star.

The voice said, Come. Then John saw
that there was a stone wall beside the road in that part: but it had
(what he had never seen in a garden wall before) a window. There was not
glass in the window and no bars; it was just a square hole in the wall.
Through it he saw a green wood full of primroses: and he remembered
suddenly how he had gone into another wood to pull primroses, as a
child, very long ago—so long that even in the moment of remembering the
memory seemed still out of reach.

“While he strained to grasp it,
there came to him from beyond the wood a sweetness and pang so piercing
that instantly he forgot his father's house, and his mother, and the
fear of the Landlord, and the burden of the rules. All the furniture of
his mind was taken away. A moment later he found that he was sobbing,
and the sun had gone in: and what it was that had happened to him he
could not quite remember, nor whether it had happened in this wood, or
in the other wood when he was a child. It seemed to him that a mist
which hung at the far end of the wood had parted for a moment, and
through the rift he had seen a calm sea, and in the sea an island, where
the smooth turf sloped down unbroken to the bays, and out of the
thickets peeped the pale, small-breasted Oreads, wise like gods,
unconscious of themselves like beasts, and tall enchanters, bearded to
their feet, sat in green chairs among the forests.

But even while
he pictured these things he knew with one part of his mind, that they
were not like the things he had seen—nay, that what had befallen him was
not seeing at all. But he was too young to heed the distinction: and
too empty, now that the unbounded sweetness passed away,not to seize
greedily whatever it had left behind. He had no inclination yet to go
into the wood: and presently he went home, with a sad excitement upon
him, repeating to himself a thousand times, "I know now what I want."
The first time that he said it, he was aware that it was not entirely
true: but before he went to bed he was believing it (The Pilgrim’s Regress, p. 8).

C.S.
Lewis often talks about the “longing” attached to this joy. If you’ve
felt it, you know what he’s talking about… that ache that is both sweet
and painful, that homesickness for a place you can’t remember; that
desire for a relationship you don’t recall; a yearning that responds to a
call you can’t hear, but which nevertheless vibrates within you with a
realness and vividness that trumps all of your other so called “logical”
experiences. Sometimes you get it at the end of a particularly vivid
dream; or when a sudden pang of happy grief hits you that makes you want
to cry in the middle of a crowd; or when you encounter an inexplicably
beautiful song, or painting, or passage of literature that speaks to the
most soulful part of you.

In his best book, Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis once again describes it:

“The
sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the
Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country,
the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant
nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels
not like going, but like going back.”

Now this is all
terribly romantic, a skeptic like Corineus would warn. Emotionalism
that is misleading and certainly not going to lead you anywhere
logically factual. It’s an experience for pre-Raphaelite painters,
Romantic poets, Gothic novelists, and frenzied preachers, but certainly
not for the calm, rational mind, untouched by such influences. And,
rationally, don’t you think that Corineus would have a point? Isn’t that
the “mythology” he is talking about, those flights of fancy ready to
carry us away into “lies breathed through silver”?

During the first half of the 20th
century in which Jack lived in, psychologists touting psychoanalysis
like Sigmund Freud were in their heyday. And those psychologists
certainly weren’t leading people to God, but rather using secular
arguments to explain away the desires and fixations of mankind which
they argued were byproducts of traumatic experience and psychic
reaction, rather than anything attached to a soul, much less God. Such
romantic feelings and thoughts were nothing but hiccups of the mind,
complexes which mankind had to sort and wade through to get to any
semblance of reality. Freud argued that mankind started with a tabula rasa, or a “blank slate.” According to tabula rasa,
nothing is inherent, everything that was part of a person was written
on her, everything was a reaction, there really was no such thing as a
will, free or otherwise.

Yet there was a student of Freud’s, Carl
Jung, who provided an alternative explanation, an explanation that is a
vital component to our discussion tonight. Jung saw evidence for a
“universal consciousness,” where all people seemed to carry a certain
set of pre-existent information written in their minds or, if you want
to be even more radical, their souls. Jung noticed trends in mythology,
where the same patterns would crop up again and again, even in unrelated
cultures that had no knowledge of each other. These patterns were
called archetypes, universal truths that came tumbling out in
the form of stories and myths. Other more recent writers like Joseph
Campbell and filmmakers like George Lucas have also explored this
territory, but they are all arguing the same thing. Although the myths
and stories sometimes differed in details, the core story was the same.
The Hero’s Journey. The Great Mother. The Wise Old Man. The Dying God.
There was something inside of humankind that was transmitting these
stories again and again and again.

This is where we find Jack’s
“Joy.” Perhaps the longing that C.S. Lewis, and so many of the rest of
us, have felt is part of that pre-existent memory we instinctually bring
with us. Perhaps this longing that Jack felt so deeply, but which his
reason resisted so long, which seemed so natural… perhaps it was not so
illogical after all. Perhaps his deep responses to mythology, this
yearning “joy,” this wild (but meaningful) imagination of his… perhaps
there was purpose behind it after all.

It was this train of
thought that J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson used on Jack during that
influential night time walk in the woods. Again, Jack had recently had
powerful experiences that led him to believe in a higher power, but he
still resisted the “myth” of Christianity. “Lies breathed through
silver,” he retorted to Tolkien and Dyson’s arguments. He would not be
taken in!

Yet Tolkien and Hugo persisted. Christianity is the true
myth, they said. It is what all the other myths were pointing to, what
the collective unconscious was trying to communicate, what Jack’s “joy”
was trying to lead him to. It was imagination made real, spirit made
flesh!

The argument resonated with Jack, stuck with him, for it
was the very same argument he used against his friend “Corineus” in his
essay “Myth Became Fact”:

Now as myth transcends
thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a
myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without
ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination
to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a
particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We
pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a
historical person crucified… under Pontius Pilate. By becoming
fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that
men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did
not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly
Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive
the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace
which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the
other.
The man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but
continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive
than the one who assented and did not think much about it (God in The Dock, “Myth Became Fact,” p. 67).

Again, in Jack’s autobiographical allegory that is called The Pilgrim’s Regress,
Jack’s alter ego John has gone through an arduous journey from secular
skepticism towards faith, and near the end of the journey John is faced
with this argument of Christianity’s mythical nature once again:

Of
all the people he had met in his journey only Wisdom appeared to him in
the caverns, and troubled him by saying that no man could really come
where he had come and that all his adventures were but figurative, for
no professed experience of these places could be anything other than
mythology. But then another voice spoke to him from behind him, saying:

“Child, if you will, it is
mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, also myth and metaphor:
but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the
hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but man’s
inventing. But this My inventing, this is the veil under which I have
chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your
sense and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and
live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the
story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know
that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living
God?” (The Pilgrim’s Regress, p. 169).

Perhaps
it’s because I’m a playwright, a writer, but I find great sense in
God’s title as The Author and Finisher of our Faith. Author, for the
Father wrote the story, the monomyth of our existence. Finisher, for
Christ enacted that story, was the physical instrument of making it
real. The myths which C.S. Lewis loved… there was a reason he responded
so powerfully to them. It’s because those same myths were already
written upon his mind, upon his bones, upon his soul. He responded so
powerfully to the stories because he recognized them, he already knew
them intimately, even though he hadn’t known that he knew them, it was
buried deep, but still attainable, like a voice from the dust calling to
him to unearth it. It was that true self, buried beneath a whole
mountain of wordy escapes and reasoned dodges that kept Jack from
discovering this pre-existent identity written upon his soul, much like
his bitter heroine Orual in his masterpiece Till We Have Faces, based
upon yet another myth, the story of Cupid and Psyche. Orual, the
possessive sister of Psyche, blames her hard existence on the gods, only
to discover this war of words she had collected to rail against them,
ultimately fail her once she discovers her true identity:

Lightly
men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to
write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you
really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what
you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter
the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which
you have, all the time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll
not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us
openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why
should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us
face to face till we have faces? (Till We Have Faces, p. 294).

Mythology
informed C.S. Lewis’s work before his conversion to Christianity, but
transformed it after his conversion. The myth now had meaning, it was
more than just “lies breathed through silver”… it was silver still, but
this time a mirror, providing a reflection of the soul. The question was
raised to Jack after his conversion about how the reactions to his work
would be impacted by his new found Christianity…whether the literary
world would truly accept a vocal, practicing Christian. Jack couldn’t be
bothered by that…he had a greater weight of glory to attend to. And
attend to it, he did.
Whether it was Till We Have Faces,
or The Chronicles of Narnia, one quickly realizes that Jack never
abandoned this idea of the “true myth.” And perhaps it is in the great
lion Aslan, the Christ figure which Jack is most famous for that shows
us most clearly what Jack’s own “myths” were meant to do. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
Jack bares the purpose of his stories. Never lacking a directness and
plainness of spirit in his writing, yet I always find Lucy and Edmund
Pevensie’s sincere and heartfelt departure from Narnia in this story to
be extremely moving:

“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own home now.”

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

“Are—are you there too, sir?” said Edmund.

“I
am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know
me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to
Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better
there” (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 16).

It
is in this spirit that Lewis wrote his work. His myths were crafted as
shadows of a greater story. Just as the myths of his childhood had led
him to the kneel, not before Prometheus, or Osiris, or Balder, but
rather the Real Myth. So it was with Aslan. The story was not to be
worshipped in an of itself, but it was meant to direct a person to Jesus
Christ, Author and Finisher of our Faith.

5 comments:

Beautifully conceived and written. I've learned something new in reading this. For one thing I've gained a better understanding of the book my husband gave me when we first met, telling me if I wanted to understand him I should read Till We Have Faces, for it had moved him, very possibly, more than any other book. And what a lovely point you make about the myths we find everywhere, and their essential relation to the true myth incarnated, living, dying, and rising again in the course of actual human history. Thank you.